Looking for feedback, 3rd party add ins

Looking for feedback about your one product you would want to include in a new Sharepoint deployment. I’ll keep this open as long as needed. Check out the Polls page at the top.

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Back at work

Back at work after being on paternity leave. I have some ideas for blog posts and should be writing them soon I hope.

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Using authenticated RSS feed to Serve Public Data

I can only a little bit about this project now since we haven’t completed it but it’s really neat.

Currently Departmental phone numbers are tracked on a Sharepoint list and then once a year, formatted and sent off to the printers for publication. Some people decided we should make this information publicly accessible in an online version. The problem is the Sharepoint data lies in an authenticated NTLM environment, how do we get it out there for the public?

We, being Brian and I, created a simple AutoIT script that fetches the RSS feed of the list and saves it as an XML file. We added a service account to the Sharepoint site as a reader so it can access the information. The AutoIT runs as this user on a scheduled basis on a web server. With the XML file saved, it is passed through a ColdFusion script that parses the XML data to get the information we need and writes it into a SQL database. When users update a number in the list, the RSS feed sends this information along, the script gets it, processes it and dumps it into the database.

It’s probably a round about method of doing it and I’m sure there’s a more elegant Object Model method for this. As a non-developer, I relied on Brian’s ColdFusion ability to handle the data conversion.

We had a student programmer code an interface and it’s going to be rolled into our publicly searchable data soon.

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Thanks readers

Thanks to all my readers out in the interweb. This month I’ve totally blown my unique visitor record out of the water. I hope you are enjoying the content I’m putting out there and hope you are enjoying the training template. The number of downloads is impressive.

Continue reading and I’ll continue to share my adventures in Sharepoint.

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Page viewer web part and UNC paths

No it isn’t what you think, I’m still at ECU and not a Tar Heel. This post comes about from an internal project that I had done and now we are reworking. A bit of history, we are trying out using Sharepoint to serve as a file server for various software packages.

Some concerns were raised about performance because these large files live in the content databases, which is valid I suppose. So I have been experimenting with trying to find ways to deliver the files from a different file server so the files stay outside the Sharepoint databases. Easy, I’ll use the page viewer web part and link to the file on the file server, problem solved. Or so I thought.

IE is the only browser that will allow UNC connections in a page viewer web part and serve up the file. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (horray for multi-platform environment) show the file path but don’t serve it. Searching for ideas on how to deliver the files, I turned to Tony and Brian, two web gurus I work with.

Trial and error later with little success, Brian had an idea to use AutoIt to build an installer with the UNC path embedded. This is then uploaded into a Sharepoint document library and linked to. This worked as desired. After some tweaking, we developed a little application that was all variable based and allowed us to create exe files on the fly. That AutoIt code is as follows:

Dim $uncpath;
 
$uncpath = InputBox("UNC Path", "Enter the UNC Path of the EXE");
If(@error = 1) Then
	Exit;
EndIf	
 
Dim $fileToWrite;
Dim $fileHandle;
$fileToWrite = InputBox("File to Create", "Enter the name of the desired executable (w/o extension)", "c:\fileName");
 
If(@error = 1) Then
	Exit;
EndIf	
 
$fileHandle = FileOpen($fileToWrite & ".au3", 2);
 
If($fileHandle = -1) Then
	MsgBox(16, "File Error", "Cannot open file: " & $fileToWrite );
 
	Exit;
EndIf	
 
 
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "If(FileExists(""" &  $uncpath & """)) Then");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "MsgBox(64, 'Please Wait', 'Loading setup files.  Please wait.', 20);");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "	Run(""" & $uncpath & """);");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "Else");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "	MsgBox(16, 'Sorry', 'You are either off-campus or do not have permission to access this program.')");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "EndIf");
FileClose($fileHandle);
 
Run("C:\Program Files\AutoIt3\Aut2Exe\aut2exe.exe /in " & $fileToWrite & ".au3 /out " & $fileToWrite & ".exe /icon c:\jr.ico ");

The advantage of this is that small files (280k vs 700 mb) can be uploaded to Sharepoint which will then go out and grab the actual setup files for the application to install. While StoragePoint would be great to have to remedy this, it isn’t available due to fiscal responsibility to our budget.

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Disregard, activating post rank

Trying to verify my blog at post rank.

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Sharepoint Saturday Recap

Wow what an amazing day in Charlotte! There were so many great sessions to choose from. Some time blocks had 3 sessions of interest so picking 1 was very difficult. If you have not been to a Sharepoint Saturday in your area, I highly encourage you to participate in one. Lots of great, free, information divided between various topics.

Check out the Sharepoint Saturday website for upcoming events in your area. You can also view all the slide decks from the presenters.

The added bonus of this Sharepoint Saturday was making the personal connections of the social network that’s been evolving on Twitter and Facebook. A lot of great Sharepoint talent in the Carolinas. I’d start to list off everyone but that’d be a long list. I also did a video piece on the Employee Training template with Michael Gannotti so look for that in the upcoming days.

Also a great announcement from Avepoint about a Press release coming about product information. I won’t say what it is, but trust me, you’ll want to visit their site to grab it. Check their web site for the upcoming press release.

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Business as usual

Not much to report on the home front. Business is going as usual. I’ll be trying a new test of my registration template soon. If all goes well, I’ll have a copy available for download.

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Feedburner up and running

Just a quick note, I’ve got feedburner hooked up and running on my blog. If you’d like to subscribe just click the box in the upper right corner and add me to your RSS blog roll. Or you can add me with the following URL: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/EricsSharepointAdventures. Thanks for reading!

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Sharepoint Saturday Recap

Wow what a great day of events Saturday at Microsoft for Sharepoint Saturday. Great job organizing this event Dux, @meetdux, it was awesome and smooth. A bit of a recap of the sessions I attended.

After a killer Keynote with Joel Oleson, NS Rana, Thomas Vander Wal, and Errin O’Connor, the event broke out into End User, Developer, Admin and Special Interest sessions. The first session I attended was Eric Harlan’s, @ericharlan, presentation on Federated Search. Wow, is this easy to configure and get running. This will be of great benefit to pull search results from external sources and not have to index that on the farm, good stuff. This is going to be of benefit once we get the infrastructure updates in place.

Dan Lewis, @danlewisnet, put on a good demo of the Sharepoint blog and how it can be accessed with Word (my favorite, do this every week) and Live Writer, which I need to try. He also made mention of Lee Reed’s series on endusersharepoint.com on how to pimp your blog. Also check out PixelMill for Sharepoint skins for your blog. Good stuff by @hwaterman.

Joel, @joeloleson, put on a great demo of Twitter and Sharepoint administration. The room was packed, and the live feed was dropping people. There were over 50 people watching his presentation via the web cam that was set up. Joel lived up to his Sharepoint rockstar persona.

I had high hopes for the calendaring in Sharepoint sessions put on by Julie and Daisy from Bamboo Solutions. It unfortunately took a sales pitch approach for a few of their web parts. This isn’t necessarily bad, as they were a sponsor, but I had hoped that they’d show some more detailed uses of the calendar in Sharepoint, similar to Mark’s creating a master calendar.

Paul Galvin, @paulgalvin, shared experiences in creating vertical applications within Sharepoint. His point of using Sharepoint as a platform to solving business needs is spot on. Lead and development time is significantly shorter than in the standard ASP.Net Visual Studio cases. I can’t wait to do more business process application solutions in our environment.

The last session of the day was Content Types with Kenneth Lo, @kenneth_lo. This was a great refresher session for me. I struggle at times using content types. They are definitely powerful in resolving the typical network folder structure.

All in all this was a great day. Lots of great people and prizes, won a raffle for Sharepoint 2007 Unleashed. I had thought I ordered this from Amazon in the past but snafu-ed and got the Project Server version, oops. I’m excited to go through it. I got to meet Mark, @EUSP, in person. We didn’t get much time to chat unfortunately. Also I met Ruth, @rlilly, who is trying to get a user group started in eastern NC for Sharepoint. I’m looking forward to hearing something on that front. There are like no user groups east of Raleigh, except for the Tweet ups in Greenville. Definitely looking forward to the next Sharepoint Saturday in DC and/or Charlotte.

If you hadn’t noticed, there were a lot of Twitter folks there. If you aren’t using it, start, it’s a great tool.

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